ABSTRACT
The concept of waste tracking is not new, but the degree of administrative, technical and regulatory involvement is. From the mid-1980s onward, hazardous materials and waste tracking began to emerge as an important component of environmental management systems. With much of the command and control legislation firmly in place, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) soon began to focus more and more of its attention on reducing or eliminating the generation of wastes at their source. EPA suggested that these costs should include the cost of internal regulatory oversight, paperwork and reporting requirements, loss of production potential, transportation, off site storage, treatment and disposal costs, employee exposure, liability insurance and future liability. Cost allocation can properly highlight the parts of the organization where the greatest opportunities for waste minimization exist; without allocating costs, waste minimization opportunities can be obscured by accounting practices that do not clearly identify the activities generating the hazardous wastes.
